Facebook Still Tracks You After You Deactivate Account

submitted by BackwardsCompatible from cnet.com

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[–][deleted] 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Is there ANY way for us to stop facebook from gathering our information other than protesting through written articles? If a death certificate is submitted to fb as they requested for complete deletion of account, will they erase all the data and/or stop gathering information?

[–]DaSmooch 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Yes there is. You could edit your /etc/hosts or C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts to put in zero-routing entries for all facebook frontend servers. Here are my current entries for facebook: https://imgur.com/qpHckik

Little explanation: Normally you ask a DNS server for the IP adress of a certain domain name. But you can change the routing via an entry in the host file. Now you are pinning a domain name to an IP adress. This adress can be anything. 0.0.0.0 is in windows = 127.0.0.1 = localhost. A request in this case would not be directed to the server, instead it will ask your own pc for that resource. This will obv. not be answered.

To make it more simple, than editing the hosts file in a text-editor, you could download a tool like hostsman (http://www.abelhadigital.com/hostsman) and subscribe to adblocking lists. This will block most of advertising, trackers... on a os level instead of application level (e.g. adblocker in browser).

Edit: Just saw that abelhadigital.com seemst to be down (or atleast not reachable via my VPN). Here is a cnet.com download link for hostsman: https://download.cnet.com/HostsMan/3000-2381_4-10409169.html

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Wow, thank you. I changed the value under DNS to 0.0.0.0 Did I do it right?

https://imgur.com/a/UIqdVYF

[–]DaSmooch 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

No. You just edited a comment line (every line with # at the beginning is just a comment). You would need to put in all those rules: https://imgur.com/qpHckik

You could add it under or over you current entries for Microsoft. It doesn't matter if you put in 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0 and then the url. It is for Microsoft both the same address.